Don’t steal. It’s not nice ‘yo

A chapter entitled Mother of Two Mobile Children Under Two. It’s a rather tragic tale that, upon beginning, I cried tears of fear of the unknown.

To bathe, diaper, and pajama them it took forty-five minutes. Fourty. Five. Minutes.

I went through 4 diapers. On Kinley alone. He kept wiggling out of them and ripping the velcro tabs off. I really need to get cloth diapers.

Getting him in footie pajamas, well, I feel like I deserve an Olympic metal quite frankly. I forgot how hard this gets.

And then, I was reminded it only gets worse. Because, at the exact moment of realization, the toddler emptied and scrubbed an entire bottle of body wash (tear-free luckily) in her hair with the claims of “I help momma. I help.” That happened in the 5-8 minutes it took to pee and clean up. I was right next to her the entire time, but only slightly out of reach due to the fact I didn’t want to dirty my freshly laundered clothes in a non-emergency situation. Had I known that while rinsing the suds from her hair, she would learn that open-handed splashing works much more effectively than fist splashing in soaking me, I would have just peed myself. In both circumstances, when I would say “Caitlin, NO! NO! STOP! NO OR YOU GO TO TIME OUT ONCE YOU’RE OUT!” she would respond, “Hehe no momma!” Or just plain ignore me.

She did go to time-out. For several, several minutes. The first two infractions gave her four, two minutes each. Then add running away and popping a squat by the front door while I tried to get a diaper on. And then smacking Kinley in the head when he pulled her hair (although they both deserved it in my honest opinion). She decided streaking was an appropriate reaction to me wanting to brush her hair (“When he gets a hurt inside and he can’t get his emotions into words, he takes to streaking.” NAME THAT MOVIE.) She bashed me in the head when she asked to brush her hair herself, and dumped the cup of water I gave her to rinse her mouth out from toothpaste on the floor. I eventually gave up keeping up on how long she was supposed to stay in, so I kept her in for 20.

I figured a few extra minutes would be sufficient for any other trouble she got herself into.